Gregory Djanikian

b. 1949

Gregory Djanikian’s work explores, among other things, the private and public legacies of family, history, and culture, often through meditations on his own Armenian heritage and childhood emigration to the United States. His poems also investigate how language, especially the American idiom, is enriched or reinvented. He has a keen ear for what he calls the “unexpected syntactic constructions” and “surprising turns of phrase” that immigrants contribute to English. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he now lives in Philadelphia, where he directs the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.